Thing #10: Collaboration: Wikis

I recently did a bit of research on wikis and presented a brief introduction to wikis at one of our monthly reference workshops, so I've been learning about and exploring wikis over the summer.

At first, I had NO idea what a wiki was! I viewed the Common Craft video "Wikis in Plain English" on Youtube and found that very helpful in getting a grasp of what wikis are. I explored several wikis, such as ALA's Every Child Ready to Read wiki, Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, and Megalibrarian (I found several good storytime and craft ideas in this wiki).

Finally, I actually CREATED my own simple wiki on Wikispaces.com, so that I could actually show the other librarians I was presenting to- how to create, edit or add to a wiki. I thought it might be useful to make a wiki where the librarians doing storytime at our branch could collaborate on/ get ideas about various themes and titles to read. I thought a wiki would be more practical than all of us e-mailing and copying eachother on e-mail, etc. I created a simple wiki using a table format with theme at the top and then title ideas for that theme in the lines below.